Dive Brief:
- More than 110,000 students received corporal punishment during the 2013-14 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s latest Civil Rights Data Collection, and a disproportionate number of them were black or students with disabilities.
- The Washington Post reports that is partly why Education Secretary John King called on governors and state school leaders to ban corporal punishment this week — 28 already do, but 15 states still allow the disciplinary technique and seven others don’t forbid it.
- A Brookings Institution report from January found cases of corporal punishment to be concentrated in Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma, where 80% of cases occurred.
Dive Insight:
Schools around the country are rethinking discipline in a range of ways. In addition to questions about corporal punishment, districts have become more reflective about the consequences of exclusionary discipline policies like suspension and expulsion that take students out of classrooms and make them more likely to fall farther behind, academically, or come into contact with the juvenile justice system. These policies, too, disproportionately impact black and Latino students as well as students with disabilities.
The equity issue is an important one. Researchers at American University and the University of California, Davis, recently found elementary school students who are taught by teachers of their same race are less likely to face exclusionary discipline. The effect was particularly pronounced for black boys. Schools can take a close look at their own disciplinary data to find out what disparities exist in the application of punishment among their teachers and students.
